A review by emily_wigham
The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino

5.0

This is a beautiful collection of short stories, and the first of Calvino's writing that I have read. I was turned on to him by a dear friend, quite aghast that I had never laid eyes on the writings of this wonderful man. After reading this collection I can understand why. Each of these tales intertwine the pure joy of childhood stories, with the awe-inspiring intellect of physics and philosophy. While "The Distance of the Moon" seems juvenile in its idea of the moon being a frequented location, reached by the simple balancing of a ladder upon its surface, it offsets this fantastical notion with a true concern for physical nuances like gravity, and the moon's pull and movement. "Without Colours" forces one to face both the scientific idea of a world without atmosphere, and so a world without colour, and the concept of incompatibility between two lovers. "Implosion" is philosophy, pure and simple. "To explode or to implode - said Qfwfq - that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to expand one's energies in space without restraint, or to crush them into a dense inner concentration and, by ingesting, cherish them" (p.51). One is faced with the moral and existential dilemma of choosing annihilation by either im- or exploding, but hinges, in the end, on the idea that one depends on the other. To implode is explode as another, somewhere else entirely. The experience of reading this collection, however brief, was extraordinary in its profundity.